Excerpt from
Blue November Storms
by Brian Freeman
The five men lay motionless on the roof of the hunting cabin, and they stared at the full moon and they talked about everything, their breath turning to fog in the chilly night air. The cabin known to them as The Summer Place sat at the top of a rocky hill, perfectly perched so the men could look down on Beacon Point Lake where the moon’s shimmering reflection glazed across the water’s dark surface.
These five friends had built the cabin when they were in high school, but now, twenty years and five lifetimes later, none of them could remember what had compelled them to start the project in the first place. During their formative years they were called The Lightning Five because of their prowess on the football field, but the nickname had stuck with them for the rest of their lives for another reason. They had done something as teenagers that people still talked about—although no one else knew what had really happened on that humid August day when they were eighteen.
A certain amount of pressure grew from knowing the truth, and holding that pressure inside could make a person implode.
But tonight wasn’t about pressure, it wasn’t about myths. The men hadn’t yet spoken of what they had done twenty years earlier or why they had never let the complete story be known or why a girl had died and yet they were still called heroes. Tonight was about escape and destiny.
And little did the men know, this was going to be their last trip together. Ever.
But before they could come to The Summer Place for the last time, one of them had to return from the dead.
